Lady Lovat was at the head of a genus of old ladies of quality, who, during the last century, resided in third and fourth flats of Old Town houses, wore pattens when they went abroad, had miniatures of the Pretender next their hearts, and gave tea and card parties regularly every fortnight. Almost every generation of a Scottish family of rank, besides throwing off its swarm of male cadets, who went abroad in quest of fortune, used to produce a corresponding number of daughters, who stayed at home, and for the most part became old maids. These gentlewomen, after the death of their parents, when, of course, a brother or nephew succeeded to the family seat and estate, were compelled to leave home, and make room for the new laird to bring up a new generation, destined in time to experience the same fate. Many of these ladies, who in Catholic countries would have found protection in nunneries, resorted to Edinburgh, where, with the moderate family provision assigned them, they passed inoffensive and sometimes useful lives, the peace of which was seldom broken otherwise than by irruptions of their grand-nephews, who came with the hunger of High School boys, or by the more stately calls of their landed cousins and brothers, who rendered their visits the more auspicious by a pound of hyson for the caddy, or a replenishment of rappee for the snuff-box. The leddies, as they were called, were at once the terror and the admiration of their neighbours in the stair, who looked up to them as the patronesses of the land, and as shedding a light of gentility over the flats below.

In the best days of the Old Town, people of all ranks lived very closely and cordially together, and the whole world were in a manner next-door neighbours. The population being dense, and the town small, the distance between the houses of friends was seldom considerable. When a hundred friends lived within the space of so many yards, the company was easily collected, and consequently meetings took place more frequently, and upon more trivial occasions, than in these latter days of stately dinners and fantastic balls. Tea—simple tea—was then almost the only meal to which invitations were given. Tea-parties, assembling at four o’clock, were resorted to by all who wished for elegant social intercourse. There was much careful ceremonial in the dispensation of those pretty, small china cups, individualised by the numbers marked on each of the miniature spoons which circulated with them, and of which four or five returns were not uncommon. The spoon in the saucer indicated a wish for more—in the cup the reverse. A few tunes on the spinnet, a Scotch song from some young lady (solo), and the unfailing whist-table furnished the entertainment. At eight o’clock to a minute would arrive the sedan, or the lass with the lantern and pattens, and the whole company would be at home before the eight o’clock drum of the Town-guard had ceased to beat.

In a house at the head of the Canongate, but having its entrance from St Mary’s Wynd, and several stairs up, lived two old maiden ladies of the house of Traquair—the Ladies Barbara and Margaret Stuart. They were twins, the children of Charles, the fourth earl, and their birth on the 3rd of September, the anniversary of the death of Cromwell, brought a Latin epigram from Dr Pitcairn—of course previous to 1713, which was the year of his own death. The learned doctor anticipated for them ‘timid wooers,’ but they nevertheless came to old age unmarried. They drew out their innocent, retired lives in this place, where, latterly, one of their favourite amusements was to make dolls, and little beds for them to lie on—a practice not quite uncommon in days long gone by, being to some degree followed by Queen Mary.[229]

I may give, in the words of a long-deceased correspondent, an anecdote of the ladies of Traquair, referring to the days when potatoes had as yet an equivocal reputation, and illustrative of the frugal scale by which our ‘leddies’ were in use to measure the luxuries of their table. ‘Upon the return one day of their weekly ambassador to the market, and the anxious investigation by the old ladies of the contents of Jenny’s basket, the little morsel of mutton, with a portion of accompanying off-falls, was duly approved of. “But, Jenny, what’s this in the bottom of the basket?” “Oo, mem, just a dozen o’ ’taties that Lucky, the green-wife, wad ha’e me to tak’—they wad eat sae fine wi’ the mutton.” “Na, na, Jenny; tak’ back the ’taties—we need nae provocatives in this house.”’

The latest survivor of these Traquair ladies died in 1794.]